April 28, 2005

[At one time] I was friendly with a respected and powerful editor of cookbooks who so detested the flavor of cilantro that she brought a pair of tweezers to Mexican and Indian restaurants and pinched out every last scrap of this herb before she would take a bite. Imagine the dozens of potential Julia Childs and M.F.K. Fishers whose books she pettishly rejected, whose careers she snuffed in their infancy! I vowed not to follow in her footsteps.

April 26, 2005

If environmentalism is dead, then that ratty sweater has to go, too. Ditto for sandals as everyday footwear -- only one man ever pulled off that look, and that was during King Herod's reign. One more thing: piling your dreads under that knit cap makes your head look like a Jiffy Pop about to explode. Yeah, I'm talking to you, environmentalists. It's time to keep up appearances.

As a Westerner, my "aha" moment came in the early 1980s. I was a young reporter doing a travel piece on Chaco Canyon National Historical Park, spending the day with an NPS archaeologist. He pointed out how (a) the official narrative completely ignored Richard "Anasazi" Wetherill, the rancher and contract archaeologist who homesteaded Chaco Wash to help preserve the ruins there, and that (b) the NPS put the visitor-center parking lot on the site of Wetherill's trading post, with not so much as an interpretive sign, and (c) also ignored his nearby grave (he was murdered in what is now the park). (The link I have chosen, from an NPS site, is still a bit snide.)

Some amends have been made. If you have a newish computer and a fast connection, visit Traditions of the Sun, an amazing Web site about Chaco. Click the "Timeline" link at lower center of the home page, and then the "1896-1907" segment to see the trading post. (Nothing there about the parking lot, though.)

Similarly, when M. and visited Arches National Park in December, we saw a new visitor center under construction. Some locals in Moab, Utah, the nearby town, think it should include a large exhibit celebrating Edward Abbey, the ranger-nature writer-novelist who put Arches on the literary map with his 1968 book Desert Solitaire. Some suggested a complete re-creation of his seasonal ranger's trailer. But what he will get will be a photograph and caption.

Before Abbey came along, "Nature" writers were supposed to be an exception. They were supposed to be "inspirational" or "uplifting" or "poetical" or even (God help us!) "saintly". Names such as John Muir, John Burroughs, or Rachel Carson come to mind.

Abbey, for his part, always had his priorities straight. If, for example, as Campground Ranger, Abbey's job was to clean the restrooms and restock the toilet paper, Abbey would be willing to do so. HOWEVER, if a long legged, willowy blonde lassie in the campground looked at all like she needed fulfillment, Abbey would have to reprioritize his work schedule. Sometimes the toilet paper never DID get restocked.

Now neighbors, as you know, the Twin Pillars of the Faith of the NPS bureaucracy are (1) Get your reports in on time and (2) Keep your restrooms clean. Do these two things and you will go far! Abbey consistently failed the Restroom Test (and the Showing Up On Time Test, and occasionally, The Even Being Present Test).

I'm adding City Comforts to the blog roll because I, too, firmly believed that if we loved our cities more and put more energy into making them livable, we would not be creating suburban (and exurban) sprawl.

So here’s a simple question: who do you think are now advocates for new energy technologies and environmental regulation? Here’s the surprising answer from America: a motley collection of neocon hawks, Christian evangelicals and right-wing isolationists.

Seems a little narrowly defined for me. But maybe there could be a federal recovery plan for that endangered species, the Republican environmentalist.

After the Senate and then the House voted to allow oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, I was a little too bummed to blog about it.

You have to realize this is a theological dispute. What is at stake is not the amount of the reserves nor how long they would last. The pro-drilling people simply chose to ignore that argument. What is at stake is that it is a mortal sin to put a place off-limits to oil drilling--at least in the minds of Bush & Co.

When I was a boy, we had relatives in Oklahoma City (my great-uncle, Pat Pugh, started a Ford dealership there). I remember being impressed by the fact that there were oil derricks right on the lawn of the state capitol building. The message was clear: Drilling Is Most Important.

John Kerry made energy independence a key plank of his presidential campaign - and, of course, he lost. What was needed was a more bipartisan approach, one that appealed both to liberal environmentalists and conservative hawks. Now we have the first signs of one, with grass roots power from the bases of both political parties - greens for the Democrats, evangelicals for the Republicans.

In Colorado Springs (a wholly owned subsidiary of the Department of Defense), local business interests realize that expanding Fort Carson helps protect against the economic effects of base closure. The Nature Conservancy is signing on, because, believe or not, military bases often protect habitat.

I can speak to that for Fort Carson and the associated Piñon Canyon Maneuver Area in southeastern Colorado: both have flourishing wildlife populations, overseen by on-post environmental managers.

Go to a pow-wow, an arts-and-crafts fair, or a "mountain man" rendezvous in the Southwest and you will probably find a booth or trailer selling frybread, maybe dressed up as "Navajo Tacos" or something similar.

Frybread is emblematic of the long trails from home and freedom to confinement and rations. It's the connecting dot between healthy children and obesity, hypertension, diabetes, dialysis, blindness, amputations and slow death.

The Globe, which is owned by The New York Times Co., said it stopped using writer Barbara Stewart because of a story that ran on Wednesday about a seasonal hunt for baby seals off Newfoundland -- a hunt, it turns out, had not taken place.

The story datelined Halifax, Nova Scotia described in graphic detail how the seal hunt began on Tuesday, with water turning red as hunters on some 300 boats shot harp seal cubs "by the hundreds."

She must have justified skipping the actual reporting because she knew who the "bad guys" were, so why bother with the inconvenience of actually watching? And of course her editors knew who the "bad guys" were too, so they approved the story.

Thanks, Barbara, for helping the credibility of environmental reporters everywhere.

Somewhere along the line, cottonwoods became my favorite tree. It’s natural to want to root for the underdog: of the 106 forest types in North America, the Fremont cottonwood/ Goodding willow association is considered the most threatened.

Just as bad was the horehound incursion, seeds hitchhiking up onto the mesa stuck to our socks, moving through the rest of the county in the tails of horses and the alfalfa hay they eat. It looks so lovely at first, in patches of short ground-cover that smell sweetly when walked upon, pungent leaves perfect for brewing up a batch of old-fashioned horehound cough drops. It isn't long however, before they form a solid crusty plane of yard-high vegetation too thick to walk through. Where the ground around our cabin and below the cliffs were once graced by desert mariposa and soaptree yucca, soon there was only horehound.

April 15, 2005

After 13 years' residence in the Wet Mountains of Colorado, I have my own personal weather lore that says it usually snows only one more time after the first broadtailed hummingbird arrives.

The first male hummer arrived on Wednesday the 13th. Dare we hope? It has been a long, snowy winter.

Meanwhile, Roman rabbits

I usually think of "invasive species" as a New World problem, but here is archaeological evidence of the introduction of rabbits to Britain by the Romans, a significant change to that island's ecosystems>. (Via the archaeology blog Cronaca.

April 07, 2005

The "Buffalo Commons" idea put forth in the 1980s lives on: a lightly populated area of the High Plains whose economy, at least partly, would revolve around bison.

The Buffalo Commons will be a restored and reconnected area from Mexico to Canada, where we humans learn to work together across borders that were artificial in the first place. The Buffalo Commons means the day when the fences come down. The buffalo will migrate freely across a restored sea of grass, like wild salmon flow from the rivers to the oceans and back. Settled areas can --like they do in Kenya-- fence the animals out, not fence them in.

April 03, 2005

This AP story summarizes the situation in the West: California and the Southern Rockies are wet, while the Pacific Northwest and Northern Rockies are dry. Either way, the result could be a bad fire season. As an additional wrinkle, fewer National Guardsmen may be available to back up the professional crews due to the war in Iraq.